Death in Detention........"He was … covered in sweat and feces"

Death in Detention
Marine Reservists Face Charges in Iraqi Prisoner Death

By Brian Ross


May 7, 2004 — As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld faces questioning on Capitol Hill over the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, ABCNEWS has obtained new photographs in a case in which an Iraqi prisoner died at a makeshift prison camp run by U.S. Marines in southern Iraq.



The photographs show a 52-year-old former Baath Party official, Nadem Sadoon Hatab, who died at the detention center last June after a three-day period in which he was allegedly subjected to beatings and karate kicks to the chest and left to die naked in his own feces.

snip.


According to the military autopsy report obtained by ABCNEWS, Hatab's death was ruled a homicide, caused by strangulation, the result of a fracture of a bone in his throat. The medical examiner testified it took him hours to die.

"He was … covered in sweat and feces. It was a little hard to get a grip on him so he was moved by essentially hauling him backward by his jaw, kind of holding him onto his lower jar and upper part of his head," said Jane Siegel, attorney for the former officer in charge at Camp White Horse, against whom charges have been dismissed.

more......

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/World/Iraq_abuse_death_040507-1.html

ABCNEWS has obtained new photographs in a case in which an Iraqi prisoner died at a makeshift prison camp run by U.S. Marines in southern Iraq.

Grueling duties in prison, rounds of golf on its roof
Diary offers a glimpse of the work of civilian contractors in Iraq and their attempts to stay comfortable and amuse themselves.

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff
Originally published May 7, 2004
American interrogators in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison spend grueling hours of "booth time" grilling detainees - some of them Syrian, Moroccan or Jordanian - for intelligence clues to help protect against escalating assaults on U.S. troops.

Then, on occasion, they adjourn to the roof for a round of golf.

"I got to take the rest of the day off after our long booth time," Joe Ryan, an ex-Green Beret now working in Iraq as an interrogator on an Army contract, wrote in an online Web log last month. "This gave us a nice evening after dinner to head to the roof and play a round of golf."

Amid the flood of news about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Ryan's diary offers a glimpse of both the work of civilian contract interrogators in Iraq and their incongruous attempts to stay comfortable and to amuse themselves. It sheds little light on the treatment of prisoners but does make clear that the growing bloodshed outside put intense pressure on intelligence officers in the prison.

Ryan describes sandstorms that blot out the sun, the bane of flies and "camel spiders," and mortar rounds that hit the prison while he is in the shower. He tells of making a run to Baghdad International Airport past burning fuel tankers hit by insurgent fire and returning with a bag of Whoppers to treat his co-workers. He seems to believe strongly in the cause of the Iraq war but admits that Americans get a skeptical welcome: "We are an 'occupying force' in the eyes of the Iraqi people and you cannot tell them otherwise."

more
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.contractor07may07,0,1495064.story?coll=bal-news-nation

The Pentagon, under whose auspices and with whose resources these atrocities were committed, is notoriously unfit to "investigate" its own war criminals.

Witness the foot-dragging across many years and the ultimate refusal to prosecute any members of the US army's infamous Tiger Force for the wonton butchery of civilians during the Vietnam war (see: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE).

Robert Fisk describes a similar death of a prisoner under Saddam:

"Not long after the occupation of Baghdad by US troops in April of last year, we got our hands on videotape of the brutal whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam's security police.

I'm not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism which I still have on one tape. They are whipped, sticks are broken on their throats, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war crimes filmed?"

http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles400.htm#FullStory

It is us. Like it or not, we are painted with the bloody brush. I am so glad that we (Mrs/Dr DemoTex and I) do not have children. We have fucked our progeny. Totally.

In other words ...

Boy do I miss W. Kelly.

This is the new gulag

Bush has created a global network of extra-legal and secret US prisons with thousands of inmates

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 6, 2004
The Guardian



The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate armed services committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu Ghraib, but about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. It learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq; that private contractors were at the centre of these lethal incidents; and that no one had been charged. The senators were given no details about the private contractors. They might as well have been fitted with hoods.

snip
Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1210588,00.html

"secret CIA prisons around the world." What?? Suppose the KGB, before the fall of the Soviet Union, were found to have been running a prison in some abandoned warehouse near my community. god almighty!!! What kind of shit storm would there have been then?


"Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the{Geneva}conventions."

There it is, folks. Fire his ass! Send him to the Hague to be tried for war crimes!

I am just so shocked and appalled by the stuff that's coming down that I have no words. How can the American people be letting this happen?

The gulag article shows how this administration will bend, avoid, etc...any law that gets in their way. The transgressions of this administration have to be brought to light so the entire world can see the criminal activities of these thugs.....if not, I truly am concerned about the future of our democracy.

. . . and made available to all U.S. news outlets.

Can we start the Revolution now?

Marine Reserve Cpl. William Scott Roy, a deputy sheriff in Rensselaer County, N.Y., has admitted his involvement and agreed to testify against fellow reservist Sgt. Gary Pittman, also from New York.

Its unbelievable sad. What's more to come?

From the story:

Pittman is accused of karate-kicking Hatab in the chest when the prisoner allegedly refused to follow orders.

Lawyers say none of the Marines spoke Arabic, nor were there any translators assigned to the camp.

In Bush's world, you either speak like us, or you're against us.

I can't count the no. of times that I've seen the national news where soldiers on raids are shouting in English @ the Iraqis, & getting mad when the Iraqis don't obey immediately. How can they even obey the soldiers' orders when they don't understand them?

...that the average American finally wakes up and sees this administration for what it truly is.

I learned during the 1980s about the true nature of our foreign policies. During the Cold War they could get pretty nasty - although not as nasty as other countries.

But the standard of our nation, rooted in the standards of our Founding Fathers, is the rule of law as outlined by our Constitution.

What would our Founding Fathers say about our government sending its military overseas to torture and murder?

Looks like the Red Cross warned the White House, Pentagon and State Department repeatedly during all of 2003 about abuses.

And we did nothing until October when we wrote a report after an investigation, and then court-martial some low ranking enlistees.

It definitely ain't over.

This isn't about the Bush administration. This is about individual people on the ground level, undisciplined, uneducated and let loose on their prisoners. They are the guards and psychological experiments have shown that guards will behave very poorly towards captives if unsupervised.

This isn't something that will go away with Bush. Everyone, everywhere in the West should be hanging their heads in shame about this.

if unsupervised.

Who was responsible for the guards to be supervised?

Who "arrested" these people?

IT damn well is about Bush/Blair. And it will be until they are gone.

November (the "terrorists" will lose), that he would continue Bushian policies when it comes to the Middle East and Iraq. I hope he will be more involved in day to day decisions but I suspect many of these things would still be going on under his tutelage as well.

It's the whole American culture of us versus them, Christian "love" versus Muslim "hate of the infidel" that is to blame. During Gulf War I we were told of how "they" don't value human life as "we" do, blah, blah, blah.

I am sure Germans were told the same thing about Jews during the 1930s. "They" are different from the wholesome "us." Makes it easier to beat and torture if "they" are somehow seen as less than "us."

he will incur some righteous rath as well.

The torture and killing in Iraq are an inevitable by product of the PNAC agenda where all the other countries and peoples of the world are to be subjugated to the interests of the political, military and business elite of the USA. The brutes at Abu Ghraib, and the other prison camps, are merely doing their bidding. You do not seriously believe the official line that these atrocities are the work of just a few rogue elements. This kind of argument is always put out by the authorities because they know it will appeal to the prejudices of the middle classes. The blame can then be shuffled off onto the poor uneducated whites who are usually given the task of carrying out any acts of brutality on behalf of Western governments. Our rulers always safely distance themselves from this sort of unpleasantness so they can claim that the crimes were carried out without their knowledge.

We may all be implicated in these horrors but there are degrees of culpability. Those who actively opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place might feel that they could and should have done more to stop it. However, they are in no way responsible for the torture and killing that has been done in the names of their countries. These can be laid at the feet of three groups.

First, the civilian populations of the aggressor counties who tacitly or actively supported the initial attack on Iraq. They may not have known that atrocities would be committed by the coalition but they definitely helped to create the circumstances in which they were likely to occur.

Second, the low ranking soldiers and contractors who either carried out the killings, torture and abuse or else witnessed the events but did nothing to stop them. They are responsible as individuals for what they did and they should be tried for their crimes. However, that is the limit of their culpability. It would be a gross miscarriage of justice if fools like Private England were to bear the blame for all the outrages committed under the auspices of the coalition authority.

Third, the politicians, government officials, military leaders and business corporations who planned, organized and instigated the aggressive war on Iraq and the subsequent occupation and subjugation of that country. As the occupying power they are responsible under international law for every act carried out by the military and civilian arms of the coalition authority. Using the definitions set down at the Nuremberg trials more than 50 years ago many of this group may be guilty of war crimes. They need to be called to account for their actions before the International Court


The principles of culpability were brilliantly and simply set out by Ed Murrow

"It is now established that planning, preparing, and initiating
aggressive war constitutes an international crime. And it is also
established that atrocities -- crimes against humanity -- are not
merely the responsibility of those who commit them, but also the
responsibility of the highest government officials."

It was true when he said it and it is still true today.

"Abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Camp White Horse was allegedly carried out by U.S. Marine reservists. The accused reservists have told their lawyers they were given orders to "soften up" the men in their custody for interrogation by what were known as human exploitation teams from military intelligence. "

It's the lessons of Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment all over again.

Sadly, I believe, the ones who used these lessons are the ones who have exploited the reservists with the cooperation of the rest of the command structure. This has the fingerprints of Rumsfeld's OSP.

The accountability for these incidents must be shared by the administration and the command structure. They are equally responsible, if not more so.

I am disgusted, these troops not only destroys the reputation of the US armed forces but for the whole US of A.

it went downhill from there. Everything is lumped into the war on terror.

i am burning up about this :grr:!!!!!

The Bush rape rooms and torture chambers are much better than those of the previous dictator.

You don't mean Stalin?

is who I think they mean

Take action on story at http://www.amnestyusa.org/

open letter to bush from amnesty
usa admin has received many reports over the last two years.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=77EC1B8868C9828F80256E8D0041F7B5
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=B04794EDFE431D1885256E8D0051A241